Why is IPv6 better?

About IPv4

The communication between
millions of computers and network endpoints (e.g.: printers, cameras, mobile
devices, etc.) around the world is done using a common language, which is
called the Internet Protocol (IP). In this system, network endpoints (computers,
printers, cameras, mibile devices, etc.) are identified by a so-called IP
address, which is in its fourth generation, hence the name: IPv4.

An IPv4 address may look like
the following sequence of numbers: 84.2.36.220

In this format all of it’s
elements represent 8 bits. All bits can show two values (0 and 1), which means
that one element can appear in 2
8 versions. As a result, this type
of numeric system can distinguish among 2
32 IP addresses.

In the beginning, this type of
addressing was absolutely satisfactory, but because of the world wide web’s unexpected
growth, network professionals are facing more and more issues. One of these
problems is that the amount of distributed addresses is not enough. Each second,
version 4 IP addresses are being distributed, which, according to preliminary estimations,
shall be used up within a short period of time. Another problem is that the
protocol does not support mobility, and it is not possible to support
encryption built into the protocol.

IPv6 was created to solve the
above issues. However, the implementation of IPv6 is complicated by the fact
that, although the two versions are similar in many ways, they handle data
packages, transmitted through the network, differently, hence, they cannot
operate concurrently.

A few words about IPv6

IPv6 (Internet Protocol
version 6) is the next version after IPv4. Instead of the 32 bits used by IPv4
for addressing, IPv6 uses 128 bits for the same purpose - which theoretically
makes it possible to assign 2
128 addresses - hence, it offers
long term solutions to most of the problems that emerged while using IPv4.

For example, an IPv6 address
looks like the following sequence of numbers: 2001:4C48:100:162:8C40:CCB:1FC0:1723

The 128 bit IPv6 address is
usually represented as 8 groups of up to 4 hexadecimal digits that are
separated with colons, where each element stands for 16 bits.

As a result, all devices
connected to the network will have a public, globally unique IPv6 address that
can be sent over the Internet, which renders the Network Address Translation
(NAT) service, used by firewalls and routers in IPv4 networks, unnecessary. This
is needed because this way the central element of a given subnet, for example,
a router, would get only one unique IPv4 IP address, then, with a built-in
function, it would give unique identification to each endpoint of the subnet - which
however, won’t be unique on the Internet.

The advantages of IPv6 over
IPv4

IPv6 has many additional
advantages over IPv4 besides the fact that it has a larger address space:

IPv6
has a built-in feature to support
multicast1 transmission,
while it was only optional in case of IPv4. IPv6 devices set one,
only locally available and valid IPv6 address
to all clients on the network connected to the subnets, which enables communication
with all endpoints connected to a given subnet, regardless of whether a router
is present.
2

IIn terms of security solutions,
the IPv6 protocol contains mandatory built-in
IPsec support
(verification and encryption), while in case if IPv4 this feature is only
optional

In case
of IPv4 the maximum limit for data package size is 64 kB (kilobyte), while with
IPv6 this size can go up to 4 GB (gigabytes), which significantly increases the
speed of data transmission.

Today there are numerous
applications that support IPv6, it would be too long to list all of them. You
can find useful information on the following English language sites about which
operating systems and network applications can co-operate with the new protocol:

1Multicast is a type of connection on the internet which
- as opposed to the traditional one (unicast) - can connect not only two, but
any number of computers. In these cases data do not have to be sent to each
device separately, rather, it is enough to send them once to a group address,
which represents a significant saving of bandwidth compared to unicast.

2Additionally, IPv6 supports DHCPv6 and SLAAC (Stateless Address Auto-) based configuration
of network addresses. Thanks to the latter, IPv6 clients can generate and
configure their own globally accessible and unique addresses, after being
connected to an IPv6 network and router.